The future is again uncertain for the 400 block of South Rampart Street, and its hallowed jazz history landmarks.
Recently, a real-estate ad marked the unceremonious end to the high-profile, seven-year effort of developer GBX Group “to return the 400 block of South Rampart Street to its jazz roots,” as CEO Drew Sparacia has said. The company would like to sell the Little Gem Saloon building at the corner of Poydras, and wants to rent out much of the remaining block: the Iroquois Theater, a reconstructed version of the Karnofsky building, and several adjacent surface parking lots.
The block’s crown jewel, the Eagle Saloon, is also going up for sale. Owned not by GBX but a nonprofit called the New Orleans Music Hall of Fame, in the next month or two it will be listed on the open market for the first time in roughly a century.
Together, the history of the four structures offers a unique glimpse of the urban fabric that gave rise to jazz, and shaped 20th century American music more broadly.
While the Little Gem was renovated as a restaurant and nightclub before GBX bought it, the developer’s overall challenge was steep: to revive a once-bustling corridor near Black Storyville that, in recent decades, has seen little activity except for rows of parking lots.
Since the 1990s, preservationists and community advocates have contributed to a number of plans to redevelop the buildings, which inspired a deep reverence among the few who were able to step inside. But the landmarks’ owners were at turns unwilling or unable to rally the necessary resources to complete the renovations.
GBX, a Cleveland-based company, stepped into the fray in 2018. By 2019 it owned most of the block. Later, the company announced its intent to redevelop with a focus on the site’s musical heritage that would include new entertainment venues and a Margaritaville Hotel across the street from City Hall.
GBX’s entire focus is historic preservation; it has completed successful revitalization projects in cities across the country. In New Orleans, its staff held outreach sessions with cultural leaders and seemed to say all the right things about preservation and culture.
But now, it too appears to have fallen short.
‘Upscale shops’ now an option on important block
A promotional deck from its realtor invites different uses of the property, touting it as “a versatile platform for a range of real estate projects” including “upscale shops,” “tech firms,” and “design studios.”
Advocates now wonder: if a chain store came to the table with a big check, would they be turned away? What about a use that would present the city’s honored traditions in a crassly commercial way?
Asked if any type of tenant would be off-limits, a spokesperson for GBX wrote that “future uses of these properties would be expected to respect the cultural legacy of the district while contributing to productive commerce and neighborhood vitality.”
The New Orleans Music Hall of Fame did not respond to questions about how it might screen potential buyers of the Eagle Saloon.
Since 2016, when the nonprofit launched an unsuccessful bid to reopen the Eagle Saloon building, its board members have said that their goal was to promote the building’s cultural history, which runs deep.
At the turn of the 20th century, its third floor hosted dances where bandleaders including John Robichaux and Charles “Buddy” Bolden forged a new style of music later called jazz. No extant structure meant more to the inception of the art form, historians say.
Among those eager to learn what’s in store for the Eagle Saloon and the rest of the block is Dr. Michael White, the clarinetist, composer, and jazz scholar.
“What happens on that block of Rampart is extremely important,” he said. “We have an opportunity to preserve, but also utilize, an important part of New Orleans history and American music history, which could be a great boost to the city.”
White has participated in multiple efforts to revitalize the venerated block. He sees in its landmarks an “opportunity to represent our traditions in a way that is not overly commercialized and misrepresented.”
“It could be used for educational purposes,” he went on. “I’ve always wished, hoped, dreamed that somehow the city would take over that area.”
While the city and the general public do have a stake in the block’s future through permitting and boards like the Historic District Landmark Commission, GBX and the New Orleans Music Hall of Fame will decide who takes control of it next.
New developer has promising start, then hit by COVID, economic slump, and Hurricane Ida
When GBX first revealed its vision for the property seven years ago, some advocates raised concerns about a predominantly white company from out of town monetizing Black New Orleans culture. Others, wary after so many unrealized plans for the landmarks, took a wait-and-see approach.
But some succumbed to hope.
GBX specializes in revitalizing historic buildings, and has expertise in tapping tax credits to finance major projects. The company is well-resourced, counting New Orleans Saints hero Drew Brees among its investors. And Sparacia, its CEO, sounded the right notes about partnering with locals to engage properly with the site’s cultural legacy.
GBX’s conceptual drawings from that time period showed the block’s parking lots filled in with new construction scaled and styled to fit with the architecture of its 19th and early 20th century landmarks. As planned, the project would have turned a swath of asphalt and mostly vacant structures into an attraction, while ensuring the survival of the Iroquois Theater and Karnofsky building, which were in poor condition after years of neglect.
Exactly who and what would be inside the buildings was less clear. To discuss potential programming, GBX reached out to prominent musicians, including Dr. Michael White. As White recalled, after that conversation, “I was waiting to see what the final results would be, because there was not a lot that was really revealed” by GBX.
He was still waiting for those specifics when the project started to go sideways. The COVID 19 pandemic caused work delays, and the ensuing economic upheaval raised expenses.
Most upsetting to preservationists, in 2021, Hurricane Ida’s winds leveled the Karnofsky building. Soon after buying it, GBX had consulted with a structural engineer and installed extra wall supports, company officials told the Advocate.
Then Ida rolled through with 113 mph sustained winds, and a key site in the early life of Louis Armstrong was reduced to a heap of bricks.
The building was named for the Jewish immigrant family that opened a tailor shop on its ground floor and moved upstairs in 1912, where they nurtured the musical talent of the future superstar, then a poor kid in the neighborhood. Armstrong later wrote that, in a period of increasing racial discrimination, the Karnofskys “made a little Negro boy such as me feel like a Human Being.”
Hurricane Ida also sheared the outer layer of a wall of the Little Gem Saloon, taking with it a mural by acclaimed artist Brandan “BMike” Odums that depicted jazz progenitor Buddy Bolden, who used to patronize the club. Despite the losses, GBX pressed on, restoring the Little Gem and asking Odums to repaint the mural.
Plans that never got off the ground
In 2023, the developer held an outreach event for the music community in the Little Gem, where it mounted its latest architectural renderings of the development. The images included a new, tall building fronting Loyola Avenue: a Margaritaville Hotel, the block’s new commercial anchor.
Speakers from GBX also floated possibilities for collaborating with artists and music institutions on other facilities: performance spaces, a studio, classrooms for music education.
Among the few dozen musicians and stakeholders in the room were several veterans of hard-fought but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to redevelop the block. Some, like Jackie Harris, Executive Director of the Louis Armstrong Jazz Camp, were cautiously optimistic.
“I was hopeful that things would work out,” she said. “I felt, finally, these buildings are going to be restored. And they were talking cultural preservation.”
Others were more skeptical that community feedback was driving GBX’s decision-making. “I have been in many meetings like that,” said Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, a bandleader and jazz history expert. He felt as though the developer convened it “to be able to document the community buy-in, and say that we had this number of people and these people here … and we’re on solid ground with moving whatever we do forward.”
In the years after the outreach event, GBX erected a painstakingly reconstructed version of the Karnofsky building using some of its original bricks, which it had protected after the collapse. The developer’s collaborations with local artists and music organizations, though, never got off the ground, and no details emerged about the hotel.
Then, in November 2025, the seven-year slog was injected with new potential as GBX, the property owner looking for partners in the music world, met a music history organization looking for real estate. The Louisiana Music and Heritage Experience was exploring alternate sites for its museum, originally planned for the River District near the Convention Center.
A GBX spokesperson told the Advocate that the company was “excited about the prospect of a jazz-themed museum” on the block.
In theory, it sounded like a fortuitous match of facilities and programming. In practice, LMHE developer and board chair Chris Beary said that his team couldn’t find a way to put its anticipated 120,000 square foot institution there.
Ultimately, Beary explained, they couldn’t get the land to accommodate the project’s footprint. There are two property owners on the block in addition to GBX and the New Orleans Music Hall of Fame, and Beary said that after consulting an architect and some feasibility studies, LMHE determined that it needed all four to sell for the project to move forward.
“Unfortunately, LMHE was not able to get all owners on the same page,” Beary wrote to The Lens.
Seven years of work, with little to show for it
Seven years into GBX’s tenure, the original Karnofsky building was lost, nothing had been built on the block’s surface parking lots, and the Iroquois Theater remained an empty shell.
The theater, like the Karnofsky building, is best known for its role in Louis Armstrong’s origin story: he won a talent show there in his teens by performing in whiteface, an inversion of blackface minstrelsy. But, as a vaudeville house in the 1910s, its musical legacy is far wider.
The theater was one of the first venues ever to feature jazz in a concert setting. It also hosted Butler “String Beans” May, considered by some the nation’s first blues star. Lonnie Johnson played there, too, en route to a recording career that made him one of the most influential blues guitarists of all time. And the composer and publisher Clarence Williams held a residency at the theater before contributing to the Harlem Renaissance.
The brick building has been vacant and dilapidated for decades (the deck from GBX’s realtor characterizes it as “Ready for Renovation”). Its preservation and future use are among the most urgent questions regarding GBX’s holdings on the block.
The company’s most successful answer for South Rampart so far has been its rental of the Little Gem building. In the early 2010s, a local doctor, Nicolas Bazan, renovated it with his family, outfitting it as a restaurant and music venue and installing metal beams in the walls that kept it structurally intact through Hurricane Ida.
That gave GBX one landmark they could activate relatively easily (after repairing the exterior storm damage). In 2024 the developer leased it to Nice Guys Nola, a local, Black-owned restaurant group, which operates Head Quarters, a bar and event space there.
While the building’s architecture evokes fin de siècle New Orleans, Head Quarters engages the site’s heritage by continuing the social function of the saloons that preceded it on the corner of South Rampart and Poydras. It offers food, drinks, dancing, and community of the sort that drew crowds to the building over time, attracting Bolden and pianist/composer Jelly Roll Morton in the early 1900s; Baby Dolls and Black Masking Indians during the Great Depression; and fans of live rhythm and blues in the 1950s. (For history buffs, the raw oysters on the menu may also recall the night in 1890 when police chief David Hennessy stopped at the Little Gem for a half dozen, and was assassinated shortly after leaving.)
Whether future developments on the rest of the block will offer such connections to its past remains to be seen. The new version of the Karnofsky building outwardly resembles the first one, but its interior, like the Iroquois Theater’s, is a blank slate. The same can be said of the lots around them, which GBX’s realtor calls “build-to-suit vacant land opportunities…for mixed-use development that can cater to a variety of industries.”
Highest bidder or one who will preserve the block?
A GBX spokesperson says that the door to music-centric development is still open, writing to The Lens that it is “optimistic and encouraged by the ongoing dialogue with members of the local jazz and cultural community about the potential for future collaborations that can meaningfully integrate South Rampart Street into plans to tell the story about the birthplace of jazz.”
Bruce Barnes, for one, is dubious about what such dialogue might mean for GBX’s choices about who will set up shop on the block.
“They’ll take probably the highest bidder,” he said.
Decades ago, Barnes was encouraged to become a ranger for the Jazz National Historical Park by Danny Barker, the legendary musician and jazz historian who was a contemporary of Louis Armstrong and part of the community of artists who made South Rampart Street famous.
Barker lived to see the adjacent “back o’ town” neighborhood bulldozed for a new Civic Center, including today’s City Hall, in the 1950s. And he talked to Barnes about the need to preserve what remained on the 400 block of South Rampart.
“It was a dream of his,” Barnes said.
Considering all of the plans pursued but not fulfilled since then, “it’s hard not to be cynical. But [the block] is still what it is: one of the most important music sites on the planet,” Barnes reflected.
“It should be a mecca for the world to come to.”
